Hammer Mill Days

Listen carefully, tubey. These deer are very small . These deer... are far away . These, very small . These... far away ! Get the idea? No? Hoo, boy. Let's start again... Ah, it is you, my friend. Welcome to the Cheney Hammer Mill one-room school house, here in the hinterlands (or, more properly speaking, the hinder -lands, since you can do nothing here). Just trying, in my own sorry way, to give the denser among us some semblance of an education. Why? Simple... they're simple . And they live with creatures of quite enormous intellect. I refer not to myself, of course, nor to brother Matt or Johnny White - we're all thick as posts compared to Big Green 's scientific contingent. You know who I mean... your Mitch Macaphees, your Trevor James Constables... your doctors Hump. The brain guys. Stubborn as hell, they may be. One is mean as a snake (Mitch). But intellectually, they outpace us by leagues. So here I am, trying to explain complex spatial relationships to an ov...

It's been four years since the invasion of Iraq - four flaming candles on that bitter cake. (Make a wish!) Dubya, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's "six days, six weeks... I doubt six months" war is now nearly old enough to attend kindergarten. How fast these little catastrophes grow up... my word! Seems like only yesterday we were stoking the furnace of martial fury, seldom very far below the surface of American life. Cheney and his "there can be no doubt" speech about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; Bush's yellowcake uranium scare and "mission accomplished" fan dance; Powell's "slam-dunk" case before the U.N.; Condi Rice's certainty about the sole utility of those bloody aluminum tubes. I can see them all scrolling by like tired old hits on a K-Tel "Sounds of the Seventies" collection. (Right up there with Billy, Don't Be A Hero. ) Now, some 48 months later, you would think by listening to our leading politicians ...